Part of my non-sermon writing practice has been to observe more and to remember why I love living where I live. This isn’t always easy. Our town is in one of Scotland’s top regions for drug-related deaths. The local newspaper has daily reports of the awful things done by people that have been proven in court.
And yet, this is one of the most beautiful places we could ever have hoped to live. It is a matter of looking at the right things or even zooming in enough to see properly.
One of the things that has happened as a result of my trying to write more consistently (although that doesn’t always happen in public) is that I have looked for more things to read. That led me to Britta’s Blog. Britta is originally from Germany but has found her home in North Lanarkshire, just the other side of Glasgow. One of her recent posts (and she posts almost daily) was mainly a photo of a flower in a wasteland. She writes:
Whenever I’m in an area that really doesn’t look like I’d want to hang around, I remind myself to ‘look small’, and if this doesn’t reap any rewards, I try ‘look smaller, still’.
It was a great reminder to look for beauty in all places.
